Behind Radiohead's 'House of Cards'

August 03, 2008|By Keith Claxton, TRIBUNE GRAPHICS

Radiohead's seventh studio album, "In Rainbows," pushed the limits of artist/fan interaction by allowing fans to set their own price for the music. Now the band is taking interactivity a step further by inviting fans to manipulate the video for the song "House of Cards." The video, created without cameras, is a series of digital facial renderings and landscapes that fans can alter on their computers.

The key component here is light and how it reflects off of the geometry of objects (in this case a person's face).

At 180 frames per second, the camera captures and renders a full-resolution image as light reflects off of it.

Geometry and texture are the result of the distortion of this light.

DIGITAL LANDSCAPES

The video includes 3-D, digital landscapes that disintegrate as they go out of frame. Producers used a high-definition scanner to create this digital environment.

A LOOK AT THE HIGH-DEFINITION SCANNER USED

Originally developed for robotic vehicles, the Velodyne LIDAR HDL-64E scanner can be mounted on a vehicle and transported into any setting. Producers used the scanner in a Florida suburb and on top of a bus.

Housing

The housing spins 360 degrees at a speed of up to 900 rotations per minute to gather dimensional information from all sides.

Laser emitters

Four groups of 16 lasers, mounted within the housing, use a light pulse to calculate the X, Y and Z positions of any point within 400 feet and up to 27 vertical degrees. A digital point cloud is rendered based on the time it takes for the pulse to return to laser receivers after reflecting off objects in the landscape.

How you can manipulate the video

Log on to chicagotribune.com/radioheadvideo to see the video and link to the Google code page. There, you can explore and download the data, which includes instructions on how to work with it.

If the programming is a bit too much for you, click on the link that says "explore data visualization." It will allow you to manipulate the video with your mouse.

Check out the House of Cards youTube group at youtube.com/group/houseofcards to see what others have done with the data. Here are two examples.